Boy Kills World Cast Talks Brutal Fights, Hilarious Memories, and Deep Themes
Revenge is a dish best served… bloody.
Bill Skarsgård stars as the titular Boy in Boy Kills World, a weapon of revenge who has been training his whole life to avenge his family’s murder. Guided by the spirit of his mischievous little sister, he makes new allies and enemies as he journeys to assassinate the bloodthirsty Hilda Van Der Koy who stole everything from him. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with the cast at a New York junket for the film.
Boy Kills World is quite an ambitious film to make a directorial debut with. “Believe me, in the middle of making it, I was like we should have just done something easier. Just like dial it down and [make it] less complicated, but that's what we did,” director Moritz Mohr told me. “This movie is basically a culmination of everything that the writers and the action director and me and the DP that we love. All the video games, all the crazy comic books, all the weird ideas. We created this canvas for people to, as we put it, let their freak flags fly. The production designer Mike Burke was like, ‘Yeah, sure, make that pirate ship pink! Make it pink and purple, this is great! Put glitter everywhere. This is amazing, let's go!”
What drew Famke Janssen to the role of our main antagonist Hilda was her complicated layers. “She's definitely a very complex, interesting creature to me. I liked exploring to see how far to take it and where to bring the humanity. We all have these ideas of villains these people who are just pure evil and life is just a tad more complicated than that. Everyone has layers to them and everyone has an upbringing where they were scarred or whatever turns them into what they ultimately become,” she explained. “I wanted to think through: who was Hilda, where did she come from, where did that damage come from? How much of that is now someone who really is I think mentally ill to a certain extent and can't see reality for what it is anymore and is very lost in in the world that she's created around her. That's what I explored through her.”
Meanwhile her brother and budding writer Gideon Van Der Koy is part of a legacy that doesn’t quite fit him. “That's an amazing observation,” said Brett Gelman. “When you find my character it sort of lines up with the day that Boy decides to kill everybody. It's the day that my character has decided, ‘I’ve truly had enough.’ He's the person in the family that really realizes that they've done some evil things and that he wishes his life was different so he's really self-destructive and punishing himself for that. This is the day that he just decides, ‘I don't want to do this anymore. They're my family, but, you know, no thanks.’”
This isn’t the first time Gelman has played a writer — but would his character Gideon get along with investigative journalist Murray Bauman from Stranger Things? “I don't think that they would like each other very much,” he shared. “I think that Murray would probably run very far away from Gideon or you know get into a thing with Gideon if he had to, whereas Gideon would probably just kill Murray. I don't think they'd be exchanging notes, you know? They're both narcissists.”
Gelman’s favorite scene to film was the “disturbing” rounding up of people for the culling, while Mohr loved shooting the Frosty Puffs commercial seen in flashback scenes. It was the first scene after “four weeks of craziness and insanity” that felt “easy.” He shared that for the fight sequences, action coordinator Dawid Szatarski “made his own life living hell with the way he wanted to shoot this. It paid off, but those were very, very hard to shoot and took a lot of team coordination and effort.”
Meanwhile, Isaiah Mustafa and Andrew Koji had the best time playing dynamic duo Benny and Basho, the lone two members of the rebellion. “They should have their own spin-off film,” Koji said, “but maybe a prequel.”
It’s not out of the question either. “We could do sequels, prequels, spin-offs,” said Mohr if there is an appetite for more. “There's so many great characters in there that I'd love to follow up on, so I'm completely open to that.”
Mustafa played all his hilarious mumbling dialogue straight, which had them cracking up on set because of all the “mumble jumble,” while Koji improv’d his famous line “I’m a goat, mate!”
“I’m having flashbacks of [filming in] South Africa right now. When we weren't working, we'd say the same thing, ‘what's the plan?’ and we just figured it out,” said Mustafa, with Koji adding: “You always have to make plans and then Benny executes and we do our thing. That's how the resistance is formed.”
But you can’t have all the laughs and blood without some heart. “We knew it would be crazy and we knew we had to root it in a genuine emotion and genuine relationship. These movies need heart. If they don't [have] heart, they feel hollow and just like unsatisfying,” shared Mohr. “I'm a big softy also so that's why the ending is the end and that's why the movie is that movie.”
Boy Kills World is playing in theaters now.
